1. Technical Field
The invention relates to nanotechnology. In particular, the invention relates to interconnecting a nanowire between horizontal surfaces of a device or structure.
2. Description of Related Art
A consistent trend in semiconductor technology since its inception is toward smaller and smaller device dimensions and higher and higher device densities. As a result, an area of semiconductor technology that recently has seen explosive growth and generated considerable interest is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is concerned with the fabrication and application of so-called nano-scale structures, structures having at least one linear dimension between 1 nm and 200 nm. These nano-scale structures are often 50 to 100 times smaller than conventional semiconductor structures.
Nanowires are building blocks of many nano-scale devices, such as nano-scale field effect transistors (FETs), p-n diodes, light emitting diodes (LEDs) and nanowire sensors, to name a few. There are many techniques known in the art for growing or synthesizing nanowires. However, the techniques available for interconnecting the ends of the nanowire to respective surfaces tend to be tedious, expensive and sometimes not reproducible. For example, fabricated nanowires can be aligned or assembled using fluid flow and/or an electric field; and contacted to surfaces with e-beam lithography. As such, these techniques are limited to making contact to usually one nanowire (or one nanowire end) at a time. While these techniques are useful in a research environment and facilitate characterization studies using nanowires, they are not conducive to, and not suitable for, reproducible mass-fabrication of nano-scale devices, such as dense, low-cost device arrays, in a manufacturing environment.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a low-cost interconnection technique for nanowires that is conducive to a manufacturing environment. Such a technique would solve a long-standing need in the developing area of a “bottom-up” fabrication approach in nanotechnology.